My 20.1″ DELL 2001WFP monitor served me quite well for the last three, may be even four years… It felt huge when I first got it, but kinda “shrunk” overtime as I’ve been seeing more and more larger monitors piling up on shelves of my favorite Circuit City store at fractions of the price I had paid for my DELL back in 2004. Also, lately my job responsibilities shifted quite drastically - I went from a heavy unix scripting to a very involved windows programming. Dozens of SSH sessions have been replaced with a bunch of Remote Terminal sessions and overall I’ve been doing a lot more clicking than typing. The feeling that my desktop was getting too crowded was growing stronger and finally I gave into the idea and decided to make the move. I figured I could pick up a brand new primary monitor and demote my current DELL to being a secondary. This is where it all began :)

I googled around and noticed that monitors up to 22″ in size were literally dime a dozen. Especially the 22 inchers seemed like the best bang you can get for your buck. After reading reviews on circuit city’s web site as well as customers feedback on newegg I zeroed in on one particular model - Samsung 226BW. It also had quite promising reviews on cnet and behardware.com. This was shaping up to be another one of those impulsive purchases and frankly, I didn’t mind, because doing all that research, comparing options, buying and exchanging one model after another, all of that was just very tiring and time consuming. Besides, we were getting dangerously close to deadlines on a couple of projects at work and I simply didn’t have time for any of this. So I decided that Samsung 226BW it’ll be - trusted brand, widely praised model - I got nothing to worry about. Little did I know :-)

When I went to Circuit City to pick it up, another monitor caught my eye - the HP w2207. It was a 22 incher which really grabbed my attention right away. Windows wallpaper looked incredibly vibrant on it… colors were so saturated and bright that images were almost jumping off the screen. It was also one of those glossy screens which I thought I could not stand. Lately, as I’ve been observing more and more laptops introducing glossy screens I was getting really concerned - the time was coming to upgrade my Dell Inspiron and I was running out of options as far as laptops with non-glossy screens. So, as you can understand, looking at the w2207 I was getting very mixed feelings. Stunning pictures with darkest blacks I’ve ever seen and vibrant colors were most definitely the result of the glossy LCD surface, which I thought I will be avoiding at all costs.

Unfortunately, they did not have the 226BW on display and no other monitor came anywhere close to the way w2207 looked. I was seriously puzzled. Right there in the store I went online and googled for “226WB vs w2207″ just to find out hundreds of pages, blogs and forums where people were debating which of the two was a better buy… Obviously, there was no obvious answer to this question :)

Right about that time I realized that I’m not going to be able to decide which monitor to go with unless I compare them both side by side. And since the store I was in didn’t have the 226BW on display… I decided to do the same thing that many other customers did - I bought both monitors with the intent to return one of them later, thanks to Circuit City’s “30 days no restocking fee” policy.

First of all I’d like to note, that when I brought the monitors home I was quite bias - I knew I didn’t like the gloss and I kind of felt that my mission was to tweak and tune the 226BW to look if not better but at least just as good as the w2207.

Right out of the box Samsung 226BW looked awful. Excessive blue which I couldn’t get rid of rendered any images I tried to view on it completely dull. I’m terrible at calibrating displays “by eye” - I can see any color imperfections easily, but I’m having hard time making the appropriate adjustments. In the past, I often regretted that I didn’t have some kind of hardware monitor calibration tool. This time I decided the situation was critical enough to invest in one. I went to CompUSA and picked up the ColorVision’s Spyder2 (Exress version) monitor calibration device. Once calibrated, 226BW looked a LOT better, but still on the “cooled” side of the spectrum (still, as I felt, there was a bit too much blue and red.. at least to my taste).

HP w2207 looked almost perfect straight out of the box. I could sense a little excess of green/yellow colors. Unfortunately, calibrating with the Spyder didn’t help much in this case. In fact, I wasn’t and still isn’t quite sure if this display looks better calibrated or set to its original factory presets.

So there I had it - both monitors connected to DVI outputs of my nVidia GeForce 7600 GS, side by side sitting on my desk. The difference was quite clear - HP w2207 was blowing away the Samsung 226BW in displaying pictures, which to me was quite important aspect since I’m into photography (I own a D70 with 20-200 VR and 70-200 VR), while Samsung had a firm edge in displaying text, which is just as important to me as image quality since I work from home, which means MANY hours in front of the monitor reading, writing, and coding. Both monitors, even after calibration and excess of certain colors - 226BW had too much blue/red and overall looked a bit cooler than w2207 which was on the wormer side, yet exhibited a little bit extra yellow/greenish. No matter how hard I tried to fine-tune colors manually, I could not get either monitor to give me the “perfect colors” I was looking for.

This was a bit disappointing, so turned to google again and that’s when learned about TN panels… and S-PVA panels… and ISP panels. As it turns out, ALL 22″ monitors on todays marked are built based on TN LCD panel. While this panel is very fast it delivers the worst colors ever. ISP panels are considered the best as far as color representation goes with S-PVA panels being somewhere in the middle… yet they are still A LOT better than TN panels when it comes to “true color” reproduction. But once again, unfortunately for me, ALL 22″ monitors seem to be a TN panel. To me that meant only one thing - I needed either to give up the idea of extra real-estate on my desktop and go back to 20-21″, or shell out few extra $$ to be able to go up to a 24″ monitor.

Back to the drawing board. After some more research I found out that DELL has recently dropped the price on their well respected 24″ UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC displays to $570. And in addition to that, a local DELL kiosk at Brandon mall was running two weeks “back to school” special where they didn’t charge tax on any purchases made until August 13th… and shipping from dell.com was free… and they had 21 days satisfaction guarantee (no questions asked/no restocking fee) return policy…. AND :) the new version of the 2407WFP (the HC version) was a “wide gamut” unit which could display 92% color gamut unlike any other “traditional” monitor, which was only capable of representing 72% color gamut. So, as it appeared, for only a couple of hundred dollars more I was getting a LOT better monitor, so I decided to go for it.

3 days later (apparently DELL ships to Florida from Nashville TN, so even DHL ground shipping took only 2 days) I was unpacking the new, huge 24″ display. What can I say… DELL lived up to my expectations - superb quality of the monitor, slick design, AWESOME colors - very vivid, sometimes may be even a bit too saturated (can be easily adjusted), very bright and contrasty. Perfect white after calibration! No further tweaking required. The only thing that bothered me from the very moment as I plugged it in was the fact that my eyes were feeling strained. Either native resolution of this monitor (1920×1200) was too high for my eyes or something was wrong with this particular unit. It almost felt that my eyes were having hard time focusing… Tomorrow I plan to make another trip to the DELL kiosk and take a look at this very same monitor they have on display. I will also look at Samsung and Gateway 24 inchers to see if things are indeed too small for my sight with such screen size/resolution. I would really hate to give up this monitor because of I really have no other options… I can work on a TN panel… and I really don’t want to go back to 20″… and 27″ PVA is still out of my price range. I might consider upgrading my glasses first :)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.